


We pick ourselves undone

by felinedetached



Series: Foxes [2]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, Gen, Pedophilia, Rape, as told in son nefes, i wrote most of this BEFORE reading son nefes and then fixed things, if i made mistakes yell @ me, this deals w/ renee's backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-21 01:29:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16566998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/felinedetached/pseuds/felinedetached
Summary: While a boy is running—he never looks back; he can’t—and another boy is dying, a girl falls under her fourth stepfather’s heavy hand and thinksenough is enough.She thinksit’s time.Maybe it’s not her time, but it’satime, and this time is the time that Natalie Shields has chosen to make her own.Renee Walker, #9, Goalkeeper.





	We pick ourselves undone

**Author's Note:**

> > _You have always worn your flaws upon your sleeve_  
>  _And I have always buried them deep beneath the ground_  
>  _Dig them up; let's finish what we've started_  
>  _Dig them up, so nothing's left untouched_
>> 
>> _All of your flaws and all of my flaws,_  
>  _When they have been exhumed_  
>  _We'll see that we need them to be who we are_  
>  _Without them we'd be doomed_
> 
> — [Flaws, Bastille](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E36WU9Wzf4)

Sometimes, society looks at girls forged in steel and blood and flame and thinks _they deserve better than this._ Sometimes, society looks at what it has created and tries to make it ‘better’; tries to make something more nurturing, more mothering, more everything it thinks a girl is supposed to be.

Sometimes, though; sometimes those girls reject that.

Sometimes they don’t even get that chance.

While a boy is running—he never looks back; he can’t—and another boy is dying, a girl falls under her fourth stepfather’s heavy hand and thinks _enough is enough._

She thinks _it’s time._

Maybe it’s not her time, but it’s _a_ time, and this time is the time that Natalie Shields has chosen to make her own.

* * *

She packs everything she owns into a bag and she runs; partially because she has no other choice and partially because all she’s ever wanted is to run. Natalie doesn’t know much; she never has, if she’s honest, but she knows enough to know that public school does not care if it’s students disappear. She knows enough to know that her current stepfather will relish her disappearance, and that her mother, drugged to the gills and loving every moment, will not notice that her daughter is missing for a long while yet.

Natalie doesn’t have a plan. She doesn’t really think she needs one, when death is better than going home; when she knows that at least out here her clothes will get to those who need them when she dies.

Probably.

She holds no illusions about the harshness of living on the streets—she is ten and she isn’t dumb; she knows that she will not last long and she doesn’t care.

But—

There is a woman, in this alleyway. She is dressed in black and leather, popping gum and tapping a baseball bat against the wall she leans against. There’s a glint of silver at her hip, and Natalie knows enough to know that this woman is dangerous.

She also knows enough to know that if she wants to survive, she has to be like the leather-clad woman in this alley.

And maybe she has no survival instincts, or maybe she’s being guided by a being that she doesn’t yet believe in, but, either way, she takes hesitant and heavy steps forwards.  “Please,” she says, and she hasn’t said anything in a while, so her tongue lies heavy and leaden and air scrapes in her throat. “Help me.”

The woman looks at her, beats her bat in a heavy, deadly rhythm, and says, “What will I get out of this?”

“I don’t know what you do,” Natalie replies, because she doesn’t and she’s never been one to lie, “but I can probably help. I’m good at sneaking places.”

The woman tilts her head; lets out a quiet, harsh laugh. “You don’t know what we do, and you still offer your services? I can’t tell if you’re brave or foolish.”

“Please,” she says again, “teach me to be like you.”

“Maybe you’re desperate,” the woman muses. She takes a step forwards, swings her bat up onto her shoulder, then takes another step; and another, and another. Soon, she’s standing right in front of Natalie. Natalie refuses to back down. The woman leans in. “Maybe you’re all three.”

“Please,” Natalie says, and she hates begging—it never works—but maybe it’ll get her what she wants this time. What she _needs._

“Oh, sweetheart,” the woman says, “you swear loyalty to me and mine, and I’ll make you the baddest bitch on the street.”

“Yes,” Natalie says—sobs, almost—as she drops her bag, lifts her palms. She’s not sure what she’s doing, but the woman looks at her appraisingly and apparently sees something she likes, so Natalie stays like that. “I swear. _Please_.”

“C’mon, then,” the woman says, gestures over her shoulder, “I’m going to take you home and teach you how to run.”

* * *

That first night is the night everything goes wrong. Natalie knew it wouldn’t be that easy; knows now that Lydia, for all her posturing, isn’t the one at the top of the food chain. They’re the Detroit Bloodhounds; she’s Natalie Shields. She’s Natalie Shields, ten years old and not fit for this life—not yet—and they are going to try to break her.

 _It might just work,_ she thinks, and it’s a dismal thought but it’s the truth; she’s ten years old and Lydia looked at her and said “I’m sorry,” smiled a smile that showed teeth stained red with her lipstick, adds, “you’ll get used to it, and then you’ll beat them.”

Natalie doesn’t understand. She’s ten, and she’s seen what her mother does with all her boyfriends; she knows how this works.

She also knows, from classes and laws and her mother’s careless, “You’re too young to care, Natalie,” that she isn’t supposed to be anywhere near this.

But the Hounds—the Hounds could save her. She’s ten years old. She’d never survive on the streets by herself.

Maybe she won’t survive the Hounds, either, but she won’t know until she tries.

* * *

It’s four days after. She still can’t walk.

* * *

Natalie is fast and good at hiding. She’s never given a gun; Lydia pops her gum, says “Sweetheart, guns don’t suit you.”

It’s left at that.

Instead, she learns knives. She learns knives just like Brian learnt knives, so long ago, and he’s got ten years on her but she learns faster; both out of necessity and out of a dangerous, insistent desire to beat him. When she’s fourteen and he decides he wants more than just to hurt her this time, when she’s fourteen and his ‘special interest’ in her after the night of initiation becomes something more dangerous than it had been, when she’s fourteen and it all finally comes to a head, she kills him.

Before this moment, she was a runner. She was a runner and a hider and she didn’t do much but hand off parcels, gather information and do her best to please those higher up than her.

After this moment, Lydia looks at her with an appraising eye and grins at the sight of her bloodstained hands. “Sweetheart,” she says, “you’ve got all the ruthlessness you’ll ever need in you.”

It sounds like a compliment. It should feel like damnation.

* * *

Natalie doesn’t realise it at first, but: she stops getting jobs as a runner. She keeps sneaking places, but sometimes she’s also told to threaten people. Sometimes, they ask her to hurt people like Brian hurt her—but only for information. Not for fun.

She gets paid more, too. It’s this, in the end, that makes her realise she got herself a promotion.

Lydia smiles, baseball bat resting on her shoulders; knife gleaming heavy and promising on her hip. “Told you I’d make you the baddest bitch in the street,” she says, and fourteen-year-old Natalie Walker doesn’t care that what she’s doing is wrong.

She cares that she’s powerful.

She cares about the fact that people like Brian—people like her mother’s endless stream of boyfriends—will never be able to hurt her again. Maybe that in itself is wrong. Maybe it’s selfish; a desire to hurt born from a desire to survive. Humanity twisted into something cruel.

Natalie doesn’t care. She’s fourteen—going on fifteen—and when she’s here, no one hurts her. At Lydia’s side, there is peace and power and prosperity, and maybe she will spend her life looking over her shoulder, but.

This? Blood splattering the ends of her long hair; Lydia’s dual hunting knives in her hands; a rival gang member trembling at her feet? This is what living feels like.

* * *

She’s fifteen the first time Lydia dumps something into her hands and says, “Take it. It makes things easier.”

Natalie doesn’t need things to be easier. She likes the blood on her hands, even if she knows it’s wrong. She likes the fact that in her dreams, she relives the night she killed Brian. (In her dreams, she castrates him.)

She doesn’t need things to be easier, but maybe Lydia does; so she takes it. She doesn’t know how, so Lydia guides her through it, careful movements to show her what to do. Natalie does it because she likes Lydia—because Lydia took her in; because Lydia taught her the skills she needed to hurt those who hurt her; because Lydia looked at a ten-year-old girl moments before initiation and said what she could to make it seem easier.

But then: Natalie’s not thinking much at all, and this…

Oh, this feels more like living than living does.

* * *

It’s a year on whatever the fuck they give her—speedballs, crackers; everything inbetween—before she fucks up. But she fucks up enough to get arrested, and she laughs through the whole experience. She fucked up, but she’s out now.

She’s Natalie Shields, and she will do anything to ensure her own survival.

“There’s a plea deal for you,” her lawyer says, “if you give up the Bloodhounds—give up your mother and her boyfriend—they’ll put you in the foster system with mandatory therapy and rehab.”

Natalie doesn’t trust the foster system.

If she goes to Juvie, though—and she will if she doesn’t give them up; she’s only sixteen, after all; even after all of this, she’s still only sixteen—she will die.

“Okay,” she says, smiles a smile that’s got too many teeth, and mentally apologies to those who looked out for her, in the past—those players in this game of life; players she’s going to turn in. “I can do that.”

* * *

She will never forget the look on Lydia’s face when she walks into that courtroom and stands on the side of the prosecution. But, well—this is life. Betrayal. Lies.

Lydia was the one to tell her that, back when she was young and impressionable. “Do what you gotta do to stay alive, sweetheart,” she’d said, “what point is there to life if you’re not there to live it?”

Now: now Natalie’s sixteen and following that advice to the letter. She lets her lips stretch into a smile, offers Lydia a wink and steps up to the stand when she’s called.

And then she gives them everything.

* * *

They send her to rehab first, of course. She fucked up because she was drugged; she was drugged because she’s addicted. She’s sixteen and in rehab; sixteen with no real high school education. Sixteen and more often than not spending her days throwing up; tired all the way to the bone.

It’s okay, though, because rehab is a month, total. Then she’s got the foster system and mandatory therapy, but at least she’s not spending her days locked in a room; alternating between being violently sick and feeling as if she could drop dead from exhaustion at any time. Natalie can’t wait, which is odd in and of itself.

Foster care isn’t something Natalie should look forward to. She knows the horror stories, and she doesn’t believe in family, anyway—she spent ten years with her mother and her string of boyfriends; six years with the Hounds; and she learnt, in the end, that there is no such thing as family.

Although, the fact that she’s looking forward to foster care really only says one thing: how bad rehab is.

For some reason, that thought makes her laugh.

* * *

She goes through foster home after foster home—some of them good, some of them not so much—but she never complains and she never acts out. Instead, she goes to therapy. Ensures she doesn’t get caught in the same situation; her time with the Bloodhounds is something she’ll cherish, but not something she’d ever want to repeat. Probably. So she smiles, keeps her knives tucked away in hidden sheaths and pockets and pretends that she doesn’t feel the urge to draw them whenever someone gets to close.

Natalie spends two years like this.

And then she meets Stephanie.

Stephanie Walker isn’t the kind of person Natalie thought she’d ever _talk to,_ let alone live with. But this woman—of Christian faith and perfect livelihood—looks at her, in her leather jacket and dyed hair, with her hidden knives and painted-on smile and she says, “Hello, Natalie. I’d like to adopt you, if you’re willing?”

This is the most important bit.

She asks, instead of just doing. She doesn’t even make Natalie choose instantly—instead, she promises a trial-period (more than that, because she says that Natalie can stay as long as she wants without ever having to actually choose) and she smiles a smile that's far more real than any of Natalie’s have ever been.

As such, it is with barely any hesitation that she says, “I’d like to take that trial period.” Her smile is still fake when compared to Stephanie’s, but…

It’s more real than most of her smiles have been.

“Great!” Stephanie says, and if Natalie thought her smile before was bright, this one is blinding. It is pure hope and innocence in a way she doesn’t think she’ll ever be, and she almost doesn’t want to spoil this woman with her tainted past. But Stephanie doesn’t seem to care—Natalie knows for a fact that the system briefs all her homes on her past; they have to, partially because she’s so dangerous—and that’s a dangerous stance to have but at this point Natalie’s been with enough people to know that most of them think they can reform her.

Stephanie probably thinks the same. She’s a happy, bubbly woman; the kind of person Natalie really doesn’t mind being around. But she’s still human, so she’s likely at least similar to everyone else.

Natalie doesn’t mind. She doesn’t think she’d mind being ‘reformed’ either, if Stephanie is the one to do it.

* * *

With Stephanie, she gets enrolled into a different high school. A new one. It’s a bit odd, for a trial period, but Natalie doesn’t mind. She doesn’t care about much, honestly—where she lives or goes to school is the least of her problems.

This school, though; this school has an Exy team. Her last school hadn’t, but one of her foster brothers had been obsessed with it—all of their interactions had been about Exy and/or Kevin Day. To be fair, though: you’d have to be blind, deaf and dead to not know of Kevin Day nowadays. He’s more than just an Exy player—he’s a celebrity. It’s a bit odd, knowing that she’s two years older than him and seeing him on TV, but Natalie won’t begrudge him his fame.

His fame, after all, is what got her foster brother into Exy, and her foster brother being into it is what made Natalie look it up. Now—now she can actually play, maybe. She doesn’t know _what_ she’d play (probably goalkeeper, if she were a backliner she might stab someone by accident) but now she has the chance to.

Now she can see if she likes it as much as she thought she might.

“Exy?” Stephanie says, when Natalie tells her. Natalie can almost hear what her next words are going to be: something along the lines of “Isn’t that a bit violent?”

Natalie waits, calm and blank, and wonders if she got Stephanie all wrong. Wonders if Stephanie isn’t just _similar_ to all the others, but exactly like them: thinking that because she was violent in the past—because she _killed_ people in the past—she should never be near anything violent ever again. She hopes she didn’t.

But then Stephanie laughs and says almost the exact opposite of what Natalie had expected her to. “It’s good you’ve found an extracurricular! Sport was never my thing, at school, but I’m glad there’s something you’re interested in! Do you want to go and get gear after school tomorrow?”

Natalie stares. This—this isn’t what she’d expected at all, and she doesn’t know what to do with that. Eventually, she chokes out a, “Yes, please,” and hopes it was audible.

Then she wanders back to the room that’s been designated as hers—for the time being, at least—and curls up near the wall, hoping, for the first time in a long time, that this woman could become something like a real family.

* * *

That hope, Natalie thinks, is why she accepts faith, at first. At first is the important part here—eventually, faith becomes less of a link to Stephanie, and more of something she subscribes to for herself.

Because of it; because of Stephanie; because she can, Natalie changes. It’s a good kind of change though—less restrained violence and more a careful and honest kindness; although she does keep the festering, violent thing hiding deep in her soul restrained—and eventually she gets up the courage to say, “I think I want to change my name.”

Stephanie hums, not non-committal; not disinterested, but not overly enthusiastic either. Natalie appreciates that. “What are you thinking of changing it to?” she asks.

Natalie thinks of religion and rebirth; of a life she’d like to leave behind. She’s not ashamed of it by any means, but she doesn’t want to be that person anymore. She wants to be someone—someone better.

“Renee,” she says, and she doesn’t hesitate for a second. Then she pauses, watches Stephanie for any hint of disapproval—there is none—and adds, “Walker.”

Stephanie starts at that, watches her more cautiously. “Are you sure?” she asks, and it’s not an offensive question by any means, but Natalie is almost offended by it. Almost.

She wouldn’t have said it if she wasn’t sure.

“Yes,” she says.

Stephanie smiles, something bright and kind and loving and _hopeful,_ and she says, “I’d be glad to have you.”

They sign the adoption papers the next week, and Renee Walker gets new IDs four days later.

“I’m so proud of you,” Stephanie whispers into Renee’s dyed hair.

Nothing changes.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm working on the series!!! I am!!!! I'm not sidetracked by the K/DA video!!!!!
> 
> Thank you for coming, please add me on [Tumblr](https://felinedetached.tumblr.com/) & [NaNoWriMo](https://nanowrimo.org/participants/felinedetached)


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